Driving Innovation in Resource Constrained Environment

Hina Tasleem, Vice President – Human Resources at Wateen Telecom in an Interaction with Higher Education Review shared her insights on fostering a high-performance culture and driving transformative HR strategies in Pakistan’s dynamic telecom sector. She has more than 15 years of leadership experience in talent management, learning and development, cultural transformation, and diversity and inclusion, which is why she has extensive knowledge of how to shape the success of an organization.

Being an MBA graduate of Quaid e Azam University and Bachelors in Computer Engineering from Bahria University, her established track record speaks of employer branding, performance management, employee engagement and strategic change management in multinationals like Jazz, PTCL and Ufone.

In resource-constrained environments, innovation often stems from necessity rather than abundance. How can HR leaders shape a culture where constraints fuel creativity instead of limiting it?           

The saying "necessity is the mother of invention" highlights that limited resources can spur innovative thinking. In resource-limited settings, people have to be creative and resourceful with regard to the challenges they face in generating effective solutions. The HR leadership plays a critical role in adopting an organizational culture that assists their workforce in being creative and resourceful, encouraging a risk taking mindset.

The HR should establish an environment where employees will feel free to take risks and will not face any negative outcomes in order to enable innovation. This culture that carries as a belief in falling fast will enable the employees to not be afraid of experimentation and rapid pre-testing and subsequent learning.

The most important initiatives are the development of psychological safety, which gives workers the confidence to suggest unorthodox suggestions, enabling rational risk-taking to enable them to make well-informed decisions, and the development of a growth mindset that allows obstacles to be seen as learning opportunities.

By implementing these strategies, HR can transform resource constraints into a catalyst for innovation, enabling organizations to adapt and thrive while leveraging limited resources to achieve transformative outcomes.

When budgets are tight and teams are lean, empowering talent becomes crucial. What strategies have proven effective in mobilizing internal talent and leadership to drive innovation despite limited resources?

Within such resource constrained environments where there is limited budget and human resources, to make innovation happen, it is important to empower internal talent. HR is able to fill strategic efforts with an aim to get the best use of the prevailing resources to result in organizational improvement. This enhances visibility of the employee’s skills and competencies, enabling leaders to identify and assign internal resources to stretch assignments or specialized projects.

By focusing on internal mobility as opposed to external recruitment, which is most often more costly, organizations can use the prevailing talent to satisfy new requirements as well as open up chances to expand employee growth and visibility.

Another core approach will be to carry out job rotation schemes. Taking a long time in the same job position may lead to complacency of employees and their loss of an outlook in order to realize areas of inefficiency and find new ways of doing things. In rotating employees to new positions, HR is adding a fresh view to the same processes. Not having been established in the existing norms, the new team members are more inclined to discover new solutions.

With the help of these approaches to developing an internal talent market within the organization and job rotation HR can attract internal talent and management in unlocking innovation and thereby maximizing organizational capacity and capability in a resource-constrained environment.

In many organizations, human capital is the most valuable yet underutilized resource during constrained times. How can HR play a transformative role in unlocking employee potential for frugal innovation?

Human capital is usually one of the most underutilized resources in resource-limited settings, but it is one of the most important resources to the overall success of an organization. Cutting off employees is the major strategy used by various organizations, including leading international brands, during a cost-cutting period without considering the opportunities that the same workforce provides.

Clear communication is necessary to take advantage of the value of human capital. By being open about challenges, such as scarce resources and cost-saving phases, leaders are building trust and congruency among the employees so that they can help them come up with solutions.

In order to tap the employee potential and stimulate frugal innovation, HR can organize, for example, internal hackathons or ideation sessions. The platforms, formulated around design thinking or Lean Six Sigma, facilitate large pools of employees to comprise teams and formulate new ways of process, generating adjacent innovation designed to cost reduction, applying adjacent innovation to cash and budget streams and operations.

Driving innovation with limited resources often means rethinking traditional approaches to talent development. How can HR enable continuous learning and upskilling in cost-effective ways?

In resource constrained environments, upskilling employees are critical to maximizing the potential of existing human capital. The beginning of AI and evolving workforce dynamics, particularly with the integration of Millennials and Gen Z, have transformed traditional training approaches, making upskilling more cost-effective and accessible. Unlike earlier practices that relied on expensive, week long training programs, modern learning preferences favor concise, flexible formats such as micro learning modules accessible via mobile devices. Human Resources can leverage this shift by fostering a growth mindset culture that encourages continuous learning and improvement.

In order to facilitate this, the HR must make available affordable online learning opportunities such as LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, or Udemy, among others, as they have a variety of courses at discounted prices as compared to the established programs. The platforms can help employees develop the needed skills in an efficient way, in line with the organizational requirements.

HR would be required to reward engagement as well by ensuring that learning agility was reflected in the performance management systems and that they give significance to the efforts that people make towards personal development when doing performance reviews. This strengthens accountability and encourages continuous learning by employees.

With affordable learning materials, a culture of assistance, and the use of AI in personal upskilling, HR can enable the workforce to innovate and be flexible in resource limited environments.

Even under resource pressures, innovation requires psychological safety and motivation. How can HR maintain morale and trust across the workforce during periods of austerity or strategic pivots?

In resource-constrained environments, employees often feel vulnerable due to the prevalent trend of layoffs during financial pressures. Maintaining employee morale and trust depends on the role played by HR and leadership. Using a variety of tools, including town halls, focus groups, or online tools, leaders need to communicate the existing situation in the organization, discuss expectations, and engage the employees in overcoming them.

Being honest with resource limitations will build trust, engagement with organizational objectives, and cooperation in finding solutions. Motivation and morale can also be maintained through engagement activities like brainstorming sessions, low-cost recognition and initiatives so that the employees feel free to provide solutions to the resource problem at hand.

However, driving innovation in such environments presents pitfalls, primarily the challenge of securing management support for HR initiatives. When business priorities focus on cost optimization, management may deprioritize innovation or employee-focused programs due to immediate financial pressures. To overcome this, HR must strategically align innovation initiatives with business objectives, demonstrating their value in enhancing efficiency or reducing costs.